Items related to Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy
A searing portrait of a country in disarray, and of the man at its helm, from "the bravest of journalists" (The New York Times)
Hailed as "a lone voice crying out in a moral wilderness" (New Statesman), Anna Politkovskaya made her name with her fearless reporting on the war in Chechnya. Now she turns her steely gaze on the multiple threats to Russian stability, among them President Putin himself.
Putin's Russia depicts a far-reaching state of decay. Politkovskaya describes an army in which soldiers die from malnutrition, parents must pay bribes to recover their dead sons' bodies, and conscripts are even hired out as slaves. She exposes rampant corruption in business, government, and the judiciary, where everything from store permits to bus routes to court appointments is for sale. And she offers a scathing condemnation of the ongoing war in Chechnya, where kidnappings, extrajudicial killings, rape, and torture are begetting terrorism rather than fighting it.
Sounding an urgent alarm, Putin's Russia is both a gripping portrayal of a country in crisis and the testament of a great and intrepid reporter.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
A special correspondent for Novaya gazeta, Anna Politkovskaya has been honored by Amnesty International and Index on Censorship. In 2000 she received Russia's prestigious Golden Pen Award for her coverage of the war in Chechnya, and in 2005 she was awarded the Civil Courage Prize.
Putin's Russia
MY COUNTRY'S ARMY AND ITS MOTHERSThe army in Russia is a closed system no different from a prison. Like anywhere else, people don't get into the army or into prison unless the authorities want them there. Unlike other places, once you are in, you live the life of a slave. Armies everywhere try to keep what they do quiet, and perhaps this is why we talk about generals as if they belonged to an international tribe whose personality is the same all over the world, irrespective of which president or state they serve.There are, however, further peculiarities specific to the Russian army or, rather, to relations between the army and the civilian population. The civilian authorities have no control over what happens in the military. A private, who belongs to the lowest caste in the hierarchy, is a nobody, a nothing. Behind the concrete walls of the barracks, officers can mistreat soldiers with impunity. Similarly, a senior officer can do anything he fancies, anything at all, to a junior colleague.You are probably thinking that things surely cannot be so bad.Well, not always; sometimes things are better, but only becausesome humane individual has called his subordinates to order. Those are the only rays of hope."But what about Russia's leaders?" you may wonder. "The president is the commander in chief, personally responsible for what goes on, isn't he?"Unfortunately, once they make it to the Kremlin, our leaders abandon any attempt to rein in the army's lawlessness and are more likely to give senior officers ever greater power. The army either supports or undermines the leaders depending on whether they indulge it. The one attempt to humanize the army was made under Boris Yeltsin as part of an effort to promote democratic freedom. The program didn't last long. In Russia, holding on to power is more important than saving soldiers' lives, and under a barrage of fury from the generals, Yeltsin ran up the white flag and surrendered.Putin hasn't even tried. He himself is a former officer. End of story. When he first emerged as a possible head of state rather than an unpopular director of the universally detested Federal Security Bureau (FSB), he started making pronouncements to the effect that the army, diminished under Yeltsin and by its defeat in the first Chechen war, would be rejuvenated, and that all it lacked for its rebirth was a second Chechen war. This assertion is responsible for everything that has followed. When the second Chechen war began, in 1999, the army was given free rein, and in the presidential elections of 2000, it voted as one for Putin. For the army, the present war has been highly profitable, a source of medals and accelerated promotions, and a first-rate springboard for a political career. Generals who leave active service are catapulted directly into the political elite.How exactly Putin helped the army we shall see in the stories that follow. You decide whether you would like to live in a country where your taxes maintain such an institution. How would you feel if when your son turned eighteen, he was conscripted as "human materiel"? How secure would you feel with an army where every week the soldiers desert in droves, sometimes whole squads at a time, even entire companies. What would you think of an army in which, in a singleyear, 2002, a complete battalion, more than five hundred men, had been killed not by enemy fire but by beatings, and in which the officers steal everything, from the ten-rouble notes privates receive from their parents to a full tank column? In which all the officers hate the soldiers' parents because every so often, when the circumstances are just too disgraceful, an outraged mother protests her son's murder and demands retribution?No. U-729343: FORGOTTEN ON THE BATTLEFIELDIt is November 18, 2002. Nina Levurda is a heavy, slow-moving woman, a retired schoolteacher, old and tired and with a string of serious ailments. Like many other times over the past year, she has been sitting for hours in the unwelcoming waiting room of the Krasnaya Presnya District Court, in Moscow.Nina has nowhere else to turn. She is a mother without a son: even worse, without the truth about her son. Lieutenant Pavel Levurda, born in 1975, soldier No. U-729343, was killed at the start of the second Chechen war. What has compelled Nina to spend the past eleven months doing the rounds of legal institutions is not that No. U-729343 was killed but the events surrounding his death and what followed it. Her one aim: to get a precise answer from the state as to why her son was left behind on the battlefield. She would also like to know why, since his death, she has been treated so abominably by the Ministry of Defense.As a child, Pavel Levurda dreamed of a career in the army--not too common nowadays. Boys from poor families do apply for places at the military academies, but their aim is to earn a degree and then be discharged. The self-congratulatory reports from the president's office about the increasing competition for admission to military institutes are true. But the situation has less to do with a rise in the army's prestige than with the abject poverty of those seeking an education. A desire for training but an unwillingness to serve in the army also explainsthe catastrophic shortage of junior officers in the field. When they graduate from military college, they simply fail to appear at the garrisons to which they have been posted. They suddenly become "seriously ill" and send in certificates testifying to all manner of unexpected disabilities. This is not difficult to arrange in a country as corrupt as Russia.Pavel was different. He really wanted to be an officer. His parents tried to dissuade him, because they knew how hard life is in the army. Petr Levurda, his father, was himself an officer, and the family had constantly been shifted from one remote garrison to another.In the early 1990s, moreover, the collapse of the Soviet empire had left chaos in its wake. A high school graduate would have been mad, everyone agreed, to choose to attend a military academy that couldn't feed its students. But Pavel insisted on his dream and went to study at the Far East College for Officers. In 1996 he received a commission and was sent to serve near Saint Petersburg. Then, in 1998, he was thrown into the frying pan: the Fifty-eighth Army.In Russia, the Fifty-eighth Army is synonymous with the army's degeneration. Its bad reputation, of course, began before Putin. He does, however, bear a heavy responsibility--because the anarchy among its officers goes unchecked; they are effectively above the law. With very few exceptions, they are not prosecuted, no matter what crimes they commit.In addition, the Fifty-eighth was in the hands of General Vladimir Shamanov. A Russian hero who fought in both Chechen wars, he was known for his brutality toward the civilian population. When Shamanov resigned, he became governor of Ulyanovsk Province, benefiting from his role in the second Chechen war, during which he was rarely off the television screen. Daily he would inform the country that "all Chechens are bandits" who deserved to be eliminated. In this enterprise he enjoyed Putin's full support.The staff headquarters of the Fifty-eighth Army is in Vladikavkaz, the capital of the republic of North Ossetia--Alaniya, which borders Chechnya and Ingushetia. The officers of the Fifty-eighth Army, followingtheir general's example, were renowned for their cruelty toward both the people of Chechnya and their own soldiers and junior officers. Rostov-on-Don is the location of the general headquarters of the North Caucasus Military District, to which the Fifty-eighth Army is subordinate. The greater part of the archive of the Rostov Committee of Soldiers' Mothers consists of files relating to desertion by privates as the result of beatings by their officers, who are also well known for the blatant theft of supplies and for wholesale treason: by selling stolen weapons to the Chechen resistance, the officers aid the enemy.I know many junior officers who have gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid serving in the Fifty-eighth. Levurda, however, decided otherwise. His letters make heavy reading; when he came home on leave, his parents saw their son becoming more and more morose. Whenever they urged him to resign, however, he would say, "What must be done must be done." Clearly Pavel Levurda was someone who could justly be described as a profoundly patriotic young Russian with a special sense of duty toward the motherland. In fact, he was hoping for a genuine, rather than Putinesque, rebirth of the Russian army.In 2000, when the second Chechen war began, Pavel Levurda had an opportunity to avoid fighting in the northern Caucasus. Few would have blamed him. Many junior officers found ways to obtain exemptions. But, as Pavel explained to his parents, he couldn't desert his soldiers: when they were sent to Chechnya, he went as well. On January 13, 2000, Pavel reported to the Fifteenth Guards Motorized Infantry Regiment of the Second (Taman) Guards Division (Army Unit 73881), in Moscow Province. On January 14, Nina heard her son's voice on the telephone for the last time. He had signed a special contract to go to Chechnya, and it was clear enough what that portended."I cried. I did my best to change his mind," Nina remembers. "But Pavel said there was no going back. I asked my cousin who lives in Moscow to go straight to the Taman Division, to try to talk him out of it. When she got to the unit, she found she had missed him by just a few hours."By January 18, No. U-729343 was in Chechnya. "At present I am on the southwest outskirts of Grozny ... ," Pavel wrote in his only letter to his parents from the war, dated January 24.The city is blockaded from all directions and serious fighting is going on. The gunfire doesn't stop for a minute. The city is burning, the sky is completely b...
MY COUNTRY'S ARMY AND ITS MOTHERSThe army in Russia is a closed system no different from a prison. Like anywhere else, people don't get into the army or into prison unless the authorities want them there. Unlike other places, once you are in, you live the life of a slave. Armies everywhere try to keep what they do quiet, and perhaps this is why we talk about generals as if they belonged to an international tribe whose personality is the same all over the world, irrespective of which president or state they serve.There are, however, further peculiarities specific to the Russian army or, rather, to relations between the army and the civilian population. The civilian authorities have no control over what happens in the military. A private, who belongs to the lowest caste in the hierarchy, is a nobody, a nothing. Behind the concrete walls of the barracks, officers can mistreat soldiers with impunity. Similarly, a senior officer can do anything he fancies, anything at all, to a junior colleague.You are probably thinking that things surely cannot be so bad.Well, not always; sometimes things are better, but only becausesome humane individual has called his subordinates to order. Those are the only rays of hope."But what about Russia's leaders?" you may wonder. "The president is the commander in chief, personally responsible for what goes on, isn't he?"Unfortunately, once they make it to the Kremlin, our leaders abandon any attempt to rein in the army's lawlessness and are more likely to give senior officers ever greater power. The army either supports or undermines the leaders depending on whether they indulge it. The one attempt to humanize the army was made under Boris Yeltsin as part of an effort to promote democratic freedom. The program didn't last long. In Russia, holding on to power is more important than saving soldiers' lives, and under a barrage of fury from the generals, Yeltsin ran up the white flag and surrendered.Putin hasn't even tried. He himself is a former officer. End of story. When he first emerged as a possible head of state rather than an unpopular director of the universally detested Federal Security Bureau (FSB), he started making pronouncements to the effect that the army, diminished under Yeltsin and by its defeat in the first Chechen war, would be rejuvenated, and that all it lacked for its rebirth was a second Chechen war. This assertion is responsible for everything that has followed. When the second Chechen war began, in 1999, the army was given free rein, and in the presidential elections of 2000, it voted as one for Putin. For the army, the present war has been highly profitable, a source of medals and accelerated promotions, and a first-rate springboard for a political career. Generals who leave active service are catapulted directly into the political elite.How exactly Putin helped the army we shall see in the stories that follow. You decide whether you would like to live in a country where your taxes maintain such an institution. How would you feel if when your son turned eighteen, he was conscripted as "human materiel"? How secure would you feel with an army where every week the soldiers desert in droves, sometimes whole squads at a time, even entire companies. What would you think of an army in which, in a singleyear, 2002, a complete battalion, more than five hundred men, had been killed not by enemy fire but by beatings, and in which the officers steal everything, from the ten-rouble notes privates receive from their parents to a full tank column? In which all the officers hate the soldiers' parents because every so often, when the circumstances are just too disgraceful, an outraged mother protests her son's murder and demands retribution?No. U-729343: FORGOTTEN ON THE BATTLEFIELDIt is November 18, 2002. Nina Levurda is a heavy, slow-moving woman, a retired schoolteacher, old and tired and with a string of serious ailments. Like many other times over the past year, she has been sitting for hours in the unwelcoming waiting room of the Krasnaya Presnya District Court, in Moscow.Nina has nowhere else to turn. She is a mother without a son: even worse, without the truth about her son. Lieutenant Pavel Levurda, born in 1975, soldier No. U-729343, was killed at the start of the second Chechen war. What has compelled Nina to spend the past eleven months doing the rounds of legal institutions is not that No. U-729343 was killed but the events surrounding his death and what followed it. Her one aim: to get a precise answer from the state as to why her son was left behind on the battlefield. She would also like to know why, since his death, she has been treated so abominably by the Ministry of Defense.As a child, Pavel Levurda dreamed of a career in the army--not too common nowadays. Boys from poor families do apply for places at the military academies, but their aim is to earn a degree and then be discharged. The self-congratulatory reports from the president's office about the increasing competition for admission to military institutes are true. But the situation has less to do with a rise in the army's prestige than with the abject poverty of those seeking an education. A desire for training but an unwillingness to serve in the army also explainsthe catastrophic shortage of junior officers in the field. When they graduate from military college, they simply fail to appear at the garrisons to which they have been posted. They suddenly become "seriously ill" and send in certificates testifying to all manner of unexpected disabilities. This is not difficult to arrange in a country as corrupt as Russia.Pavel was different. He really wanted to be an officer. His parents tried to dissuade him, because they knew how hard life is in the army. Petr Levurda, his father, was himself an officer, and the family had constantly been shifted from one remote garrison to another.In the early 1990s, moreover, the collapse of the Soviet empire had left chaos in its wake. A high school graduate would have been mad, everyone agreed, to choose to attend a military academy that couldn't feed its students. But Pavel insisted on his dream and went to study at the Far East College for Officers. In 1996 he received a commission and was sent to serve near Saint Petersburg. Then, in 1998, he was thrown into the frying pan: the Fifty-eighth Army.In Russia, the Fifty-eighth Army is synonymous with the army's degeneration. Its bad reputation, of course, began before Putin. He does, however, bear a heavy responsibility--because the anarchy among its officers goes unchecked; they are effectively above the law. With very few exceptions, they are not prosecuted, no matter what crimes they commit.In addition, the Fifty-eighth was in the hands of General Vladimir Shamanov. A Russian hero who fought in both Chechen wars, he was known for his brutality toward the civilian population. When Shamanov resigned, he became governor of Ulyanovsk Province, benefiting from his role in the second Chechen war, during which he was rarely off the television screen. Daily he would inform the country that "all Chechens are bandits" who deserved to be eliminated. In this enterprise he enjoyed Putin's full support.The staff headquarters of the Fifty-eighth Army is in Vladikavkaz, the capital of the republic of North Ossetia--Alaniya, which borders Chechnya and Ingushetia. The officers of the Fifty-eighth Army, followingtheir general's example, were renowned for their cruelty toward both the people of Chechnya and their own soldiers and junior officers. Rostov-on-Don is the location of the general headquarters of the North Caucasus Military District, to which the Fifty-eighth Army is subordinate. The greater part of the archive of the Rostov Committee of Soldiers' Mothers consists of files relating to desertion by privates as the result of beatings by their officers, who are also well known for the blatant theft of supplies and for wholesale treason: by selling stolen weapons to the Chechen resistance, the officers aid the enemy.I know many junior officers who have gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid serving in the Fifty-eighth. Levurda, however, decided otherwise. His letters make heavy reading; when he came home on leave, his parents saw their son becoming more and more morose. Whenever they urged him to resign, however, he would say, "What must be done must be done." Clearly Pavel Levurda was someone who could justly be described as a profoundly patriotic young Russian with a special sense of duty toward the motherland. In fact, he was hoping for a genuine, rather than Putinesque, rebirth of the Russian army.In 2000, when the second Chechen war began, Pavel Levurda had an opportunity to avoid fighting in the northern Caucasus. Few would have blamed him. Many junior officers found ways to obtain exemptions. But, as Pavel explained to his parents, he couldn't desert his soldiers: when they were sent to Chechnya, he went as well. On January 13, 2000, Pavel reported to the Fifteenth Guards Motorized Infantry Regiment of the Second (Taman) Guards Division (Army Unit 73881), in Moscow Province. On January 14, Nina heard her son's voice on the telephone for the last time. He had signed a special contract to go to Chechnya, and it was clear enough what that portended."I cried. I did my best to change his mind," Nina remembers. "But Pavel said there was no going back. I asked my cousin who lives in Moscow to go straight to the Taman Division, to try to talk him out of it. When she got to the unit, she found she had missed him by just a few hours."By January 18, No. U-729343 was in Chechnya. "At present I am on the southwest outskirts of Grozny ... ," Pavel wrote in his only letter to his parents from the war, dated January 24.The city is blockaded from all directions and serious fighting is going on. The gunfire doesn't stop for a minute. The city is burning, the sky is completely b...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherHolt Paperbacks
- Publication date2007
- ISBN 10 0805082506
- ISBN 13 9780805082500
- BindingPaperback
- Edition number1
- Number of pages288
- Rating
Buy New
Learn more about this copy
US$ 17.45
Shipping:
FREE
Within U.S.A.
Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace
Seller Image
Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy (Paperback or Softback)
Published by
Owl Books (NY) 9/5/2000
(2000)
ISBN 10: 0805082506
ISBN 13: 9780805082500
New
Paperback or Softback
Quantity: 5
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Paperback or Softback. Condition: New. Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy 0.75. Book. Seller Inventory # BBS-9780805082500
Buy New
US$ 17.45
Convert currency
Stock Image
Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy
Published by
Holt Paperbacks
(2007)
ISBN 10: 0805082506
ISBN 13: 9780805082500
New
Softcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: New. Book is in NEW condition. 0.6. Seller Inventory # 0805082506-2-1
Buy New
US$ 20.45
Convert currency
Stock Image
Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy
Published by
Holt Paperbacks
(2007)
ISBN 10: 0805082506
ISBN 13: 9780805082500
New
Softcover
Quantity: > 20
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # ABLIING23Feb2416190205374
Buy New
US$ 16.50
Convert currency
Stock Image
Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy
Published by
Holt Paperbacks
(2007)
ISBN 10: 0805082506
ISBN 13: 9780805082500
New
Softcover
Quantity: > 20
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # I-9780805082500
Buy New
US$ 21.00
Convert currency
Stock Image
Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy
Published by
Holt Paperbacks
(2024)
ISBN 10: 0805082506
ISBN 13: 9780805082500
New
Paperback
Quantity: 20
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Paperback. Condition: New. Brand New! This item is printed on demand. Seller Inventory # 0805082506
Buy New
US$ 21.36
Convert currency
Stock Image
Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy
Published by
Holt Paperbacks
(2007)
ISBN 10: 0805082506
ISBN 13: 9780805082500
New
Softcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: New. New! This book is in the same immaculate condition as when it was published 0.6. Seller Inventory # 353-0805082506-new
Buy New
US$ 24.19
Convert currency
Stock Image
Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy
Published by
Holt Paperbacks
(2007)
ISBN 10: 0805082506
ISBN 13: 9780805082500
New
Paperback
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Brand New Copy. Seller Inventory # BBB_new0805082506
Buy New
US$ 21.22
Convert currency
Stock Image
Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy
Published by
Holt Paperbacks
(2007)
ISBN 10: 0805082506
ISBN 13: 9780805082500
New
Paperback
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_0805082506
Buy New
US$ 21.25
Convert currency
Stock Image
Putin's Russia
Published by
Holt Paperbacks
(2007)
ISBN 10: 0805082506
ISBN 13: 9780805082500
New
Paperback
Quantity: > 20
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Paperback. Condition: New. First. Special order direct from the distributor. Seller Inventory # ING9780805082500
Buy New
US$ 21.00
Convert currency
Stock Image
Putin's Russia
Published by
Henry Holt & Company
(2007)
ISBN 10: 0805082506
ISBN 13: 9780805082500
New
Softcover
Quantity: 4
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: New. pp. xi + 274. Seller Inventory # 26941210
Buy New
US$ 27.39
Convert currency